N.C. woman gets 18 years for scamming 2 elderly women in Lincolnshire

December 04, 2007|By Andrew L. Wang, Tribune staff reporter

A North Carolina woman convicted of tricking two elderly Lincolnshire women into giving her their personal information and then using it to loot their bank accounts received an 18-year prison sentence Monday in Lake County Circuit Court.

The woman identified in court as Aretha Germaine Elcock Antoine, 33, also was ordered to pay more than $28,000 in restitution to Fidelity Bank.

But that's just a fraction of the $116,000 prosecutors said Antoine took from bank accounts belonging to Janet Stein, 75, and Charlotte Wiedman, 80, in an elaborate identity-theft scheme that used aliases.

Prosecutors spent considerable time trying to ascertain her true name and settled on the name she used in an earlier court appearance.

Antoine was found guilty of two counts of aggravated identity theft Oct. 12. The two women were the only victims cited in the case, but prosecutors allege she tried in October 2006 to contact several other residents of the retirement community where Stein and Wiedman live. According to court filings, authorities found personal information for nearly 1,000 people in Antoine's Fayetteville, N.C., apartment.

Prosecutors said that on separate occasions last fall, both victims received repeated phone calls -- in Stein's case, 20 calls in one day; for Wiedman, 19 over two days -- from people claiming to be requesting or confirming identification information for AT&T, American Airlines, Walgreens and the Illinois secretary of state's office.

Antoine used the information to transfer money from the women's real bank accounts into ones she created online. Unauthorized withdrawals totaling $45,000 were taken from Stein's JP Morgan Chase accounts, and $71,000 was removed from Wiedman's Fidelity Bank account.

"As far as I'm concerned, my life is ruined and the damage done to me can never be undone," Stein said in a statement that was read in court.